“Concert” doesn’t really do justice to what the indefatigable Bruce Springsteen did in South Philly last Saturday night. It was really some mystical combination of dance party and spiritual revival, a joyous speaking of tongues behind horns and a rhythm section. It was also, as he once called his performances, “news with a beat,” featuring a marriage of the 76-year-old’s Old Testament righteous outrage at the state of American decline with full-throated calls for national rebirth.

Afterwards, The Inquirer dubbed it “unabashedly partisan,” which misses the mark in these confusing times. Politics was certainly present, but it wasn’t the subject. The subject, in the city of its founding, was America itself: What obligations do citizens owe one another? What virtues do we share?

“A lot of the core of our songs is the American idea,” Springsteen once said. “What is it? What does it mean?” And when he convenes his flock, he rises above the daily trench warfare of politics and asks older questions about duty and belonging.

Before the preacher took the stage, I found myself at a pre-game reception alongside many political and civic machers. There, the conversation ranged from an argument over Ken Martin’s leadership of the Democratic National Committee to handwringing over the rise of performative progressives like Chris Rabb on the ballot to the Trump administration’s war on the rule of law. A lot of head-shaking and sighing.

The “greatest challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence.” — Bruce Springsteen

It wasn’t until Springsteen unveiled his three-hour plus argument that I realized we’d all been talking tactics, not values. For a decade now, the political and media elite has struggled with how to respond to Trumpism. Think of the many permutations of Gavin Newsom: Crusading young progressive; social media provocateur; aisle-crossing consensus-builder. The newest Newsom has lectured Democrats to “be more culturally normal,” but it’s not normal to not know who you are at your core — an affliction deeply wounding Democrats as a whole right now.

Contrast Newsom’s Goldilocks approach to the moral clarity of Springsteen. He took the stage not as a strategist but as a prophet, delivering a blunt assessment of the national moment before launching into song:

The E Street Band is here tonight in celebration and defense of the American ideals and values that have sustained our country for 250 years. We are here to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll in these troubled times. Our democracy, our constitution, our rule of law are being challenged right now as never before by a reckless, racist, incompetent, treasonous president and his ship of fools administration.

So, tonight, we ask all of you to join with us in choosing hope over fear, democracy over authoritarianism, the rule of law over lawlessness, ethics over unbridled corruption, resistance over complacency, truth over lies, unity over division, and peace over war.

Those words generated headlines, but the headlines missed what came next. Having made the critique, Springsteen pivoted to solution: a rousing defense of enduring American values. Fist raised, he called out each one, and his crowd responded with a rising crescendo of applause:

Honesty. Honor. Humility. Character. Integrity. Truth. Compassion. Humanity. Thoughtfulness. Morality. True strength and decency. Don’t let anybody tell you that these things don’t matter anymore because they do. They are at the heart of the kind of men and women we are, the kind of citizens we want to be, the kind of country we want to leave to our children.

This was less politicking than civic catechism. “He’s, like, the only person in public life meeting this moment,” my friend Dan said while the Boss held forth. How about this closing argument, just before a cover of Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom:

Yes, these are hard times, but the E Street Band was built for hard times. And we will make it through because of the love, faith, anger, and hope in your heart and soul, and the timeless belief that better days lie ahead. This is how America renews itself.

The hardest part for me has been feeling the distance between you and your neighbors, between you and your fellow citizens. That distance is painful and it can darken your soul.

We have a president who says he wishes nothing but ill upon those who he disagrees with. That’s not the country I want to live in. From the beginning, America was born out of disagreement. It’s an argument. It’s an ongoing, blessed, sacred argument about what course the country should take to form that more perfect union. We can argue about these things and still recognize our common humanity, our dignity, and our unity.

These are not partisan messages; they’re civic ones. In an era when nearly every public figure seems trapped inside an algorithm, Springsteen remains defiantly analog. He speaks in stories. He appeals to conscience. He asks audiences not merely what they believe but who they want to be.

While Springsteen rocked, rolled and pontificated, the crowd cheered every call from the stage, in song or spoken word, to choose commonality. It was an overwhelmingly White crowd, gyrating to songs that told stories of immigrants saved by their American dreams, delivered by what has long been the most diverse rock band in history. And the argument was as carefully constructed as any inaugural address.

Springsteen introduced his recent ICE-inspired protest song The Streets of Minnesota by saying, “The power and solidarity of the people of Minnesota was an inspiration to the entire country. They stood shoulder to shoulder for their neighbor. Their strength and their commitment told us that this is still America,” and then he played it, movingly, while the photos of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, citizens killed by ICE agents, stared at the crowd from the venue’s giant video screens. Tellingly, the Boss followed in short order with classics like Badlands, and its reminder that “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

“We will make it through because of the love, faith, anger, and hope in your heart and soul, and the timeless belief that better days lie ahead. This is how America renews itself.” — Springsteen

There are countless books about Springsteen, including his own beautifully written memoir. But perhaps the one that has stayed with me the longest borrows its title from the aforementioned lyric: Ain’t No Sin To Be Glad You’re Alive, by the media critic Eric Alterman, who charts Springsteen’s moral awakening. Springsteen’s outraged rejection of relativism today is not new.

Yes, he burst onto the scene in the 70s with songs about cars, dead-end jobs, and running away, but until last week’s revival meeting, I’d forgotten about “American Skin (41 Shots),” a song about the shooting of unarmed Guinean immigrant Amadou Diallo in Rudy Giuliani’s New York, and the acquittal of the four police officers who had fired at him 41 times. Listen to it. There’s the outrage, but also a stunning sympathy for the humanity of the cops who had done something so soul-shattering awful. Then there came Wrecking Ball, with its anthem “We Take Care of Our Own,” in response to the 2008 Great Recession.

“The genesis of the record was after 2008,” Springsteen explained at the time, “when we had the huge financial crisis in the States, and there was really no accountability for years and years. People lost their homes and nobody went to jail. Nobody was responsible… there was no voice that was saying just how outrageous — that a basic theft had occurred that struck at the heart of what the entire American idea was about. It was a complete disregard of history, of context, of community; it was all about ‘what can I get today?’”

And let’s not forget The Ghost of Tom Joad, his haunting mid-90s album inspired by Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. In it, the Dust Bowl migrants become Mexicans seeking their own American Dream. Economic dislocation acquires new faces and new languages, but the underlying questions remain: Who belongs? Who gets left behind? What do we owe one another?

Get this: According to Alterman, Springsteen will come across a heartrending tale in a newspaper, (I like to think it’s the Asbury Park Press), and hunt down the author and interview him or her, seeking out details for song.

That’s the work of a seeker, not a politician. It misunderstands art’s role in society to dismiss Springsteen as “partisan,” though I get the temptation. “I don’t want to be preached to by Springsteen or Roger Waters or Kid Rock,” said Sirius and CNN host Michael Smerconish. “I just want to enjoy the music.” But Springsteen’s moralism mitigates against the claim. Because those 20,000 folks packed into the Xfinity arena Saturday night? They have the makings of a new type of political coalition: Call them Springsteen Independents.

They may disagree on taxes, immigration, Gaza, or guns. But they share a basic conviction that character matters. And they have no doubt that their guitar-toting pastor would be just as outraged by the hypocrisy of those who hate Trump yet so fully support Graham Platner in Maine. In Bruce Springsteen’s America, Platner wouldn’t make the morality cut. In case you haven’t heard, Platner is cosplaying a working class Springsteen hero, a 40-year-old man with a Nazi tattoo on his chest who, despite social media posts to the contrary, says he had no idea what the insignia meant when it was burned into his skin 20 years ago.

There’s also that whole bit of six to 12 different women receiving sexts from the guy — who has that kind of time? — and posts on Reddit where he’s just wondering why Black people don’t tip: “I work as a bartender and it always amazes me how solid this stereotype is … Every now and again a black patron will leave a 15-20 percent tip, but usually it [is] between 0-5 percent. There’s got to be a reason behind it, what is it?”

You know, just asking for a friend. Nonetheless, with few exceptions, Democrats are silent about this latest sign of our cultural apocalypse. Platner uses the new buzzword “affordability” with great aplomb. But keep in mind “affordability” is a word, not a policy, and it’s been thrust into the political lexicon by consultants reading polls. Bruce Springsteen doesn’t poll; he’s a modern-day Harry Truman, who used to say, “I don’t give ’em hell; I just tell ’em the truth and they think it’s hell!” The first politician to follow Springsteen’s lead — moral clarity, love of country, joy of spirit — will be the first to differentiate him or herself from all the cautious pretenders to (what has become) America’s throne.

For 50 years now, Springsteen has gotten his audience to believe in something, which perhaps once was the purview of elected leaders. Bono said it best when he inducted Springsteen into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

In 1974 I was 14. It was the era of soft-rock and fusion. The Beatles were gone, Elvis was in Vegas … America was staggering when Springsteen appeared. The president just resigned in disgrace, the U.S. had lost its first war. There was going to be no more oil in the ground. The days of cruising and big cars were supposed to be over. But Bruce Springsteen’s vision was bigger than a Honda, it was bigger than a Subaru. Bruce made you believe that dreams were still out there, but after loss and defeat, they had to be braver, not just bigger. He was singing, “Now you’re scared and you’re thinking that maybe we ain’t that young anymore” because it took guts to be romantic now. Knowing you could lose didn’t mean you didn’t still take the ride. In fact, it made taking the ride all the more important.

Springsteen seemed to concur, once pithily sizing up just what he models for all of us: The “greatest challenge of adulthood is holding on to your idealism after you lose your innocence.”

Isn’t that the challenge we face now? Rebuilding a country of shared values, of common purpose? Leaving the concert, that’s what we were talking about. How this 76-year-old had rekindled love of country in a throng of 20,000 strangers, bringing them together. That, apparently, he is nothing but a mensch only adds to the object lesson.

Alterman has this whole theory about how Springsteen, a Catholic, is also “Jew-ish.” There’s all of those Old Testament references in the lyrics, and there’s his longtime drummer Max Weinberg, who says playing with Bruce is an act of Tikkun Olam, the lovely Jewish edict to repair the world, which Springsteen seemed to perhaps unwittingly acknowledge. “We’re repairmen, repairmen with a toolbox,” he told David Remnick in 2012. “If I repair a little of myself, I’ll repair a little of you. That’s the job.”

Alterman had never met Springsteen, despite writing a book about him. “I did not want any human imperfection to potentially pollute the space his music had occupied in my life,” he writes. Yet the writer found himself at a Netflix screening and there he was — Springsteen in the flesh.

So they spoke, a 12-minute conversation that says much about the integrity and humanity of both men. Alterman decided to tell Springsteen the story of his daughter’s bat mitzvah. How he’d written the service himself, and that Springsteen was the only Gentile whose writing appeared in it because the Boss’ lyrics convinced Alterman at 38 years old to have his daughter in the first place. The impetus was the song “Living Proof,” which Springsteen penned after the birth of his own son. These were the resonant lines:

In a world so hard and dirty
so fouled and confused /
Searching for a little bit of God’s mercy /
I found living proof.

Let Alterman take it from here:

“I won’t pretend that the song by itself changed my mind about procreating. But it haunted me over time, forcing me to turn the matter over and over in my mind. Living proof of God’s mercy. That sounded pretty damn compelling.” he writes.

Then:

When I told Bruce this story, he hugged me. Now, I’m not a hugger, but I let this one happen. We talked a little more about our kids and then, at about the 12-minute mark, I told Bruce I was going to have to cut things short. I couldn’t take the risk that he might say something that might, somehow, interfere with my relationship with the music. He put his arm around my shoulder and said something like, ‘See you down the road, friend.’

Do you know why Alterman’s telling of this interaction has me so choked up? I ask because I’m not so sure. It’s not just because he hugged the guy — but, holy shit, he hugged the guy.

I think it gets me because I, too, am looking for living proof — what else is the act of putting words to paper? And it speaks to a hunger that seems to define this moment. We are drowning in commentary (mea culpa), tribalism, performance, outrage. We know exactly what we are against, but we’re less certain what we are for. Springsteen has spent 50 years showing us what to be for. He’s for dignity, mercy, redemption. For the training of oneself to center what’s really important in life, and the liberation that comes from living your values. And for the stubborn belief that, now more than ever, our neighbors matter. That was the real sermon in South Philly last Saturday night.

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